1 Twentieth Century Verse : an Anglo- American Anthology

UNIT - 1 TWENTIETH CENTURY VERSE : AN ANGLO- AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY STRUCTURE 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 G.M. Hopkins Poems 1.3 W.B. Yeats Poems 1.4 T.S.Eliot 1.5 W.H. Auden 1.6 Stephen Spender Poem 1.7 Dylan Thomas Poems 1.8 P. Larkin Ambulances 1.9 Thom Gunns on the move 1.10 Ted Hughes Poem 1.11 Sylvia Plaths Poem 1.12 Self-Assessment 1.13 Summary 1.14 Key-Words 1.15 Review Questions 1.16 Further Readings 1.0 OBJECTIVES After reading this unit students will be able to: Discuss various Anglo-American Poets and their verses 1.1 INTRODUCTION Literary modernism began in France, then spread to England, America, and finally back to Europe. Although many critics trace its origins as far back as the 1890s and its "death" as late as 1939, scholars generally agree that modernism peaked during the years 1910-1925. Identifying where and when modernism occurred is easier than defining precisely what it was. Part of the difficulty, as we have seen in earlier chapters, Modern Literature Notes involves the term "modern," for almost every literary period from the eighteenth century considered its works "modern" in relation to those from preceding eras. Another problem, as many critics have noted, is that modernism appears to constitute a cluster of separate movements, such as symbolism and imagism, rather than a unified approach to literature. Finally, modern authors themselves seem more distinguished by their differences than by their similarities. Yet, while the novels of Marcel Proust differ strikingly in subject matter and tone from those of Franz Kafka, and the poetry of William Butler Yeats sharply contrasts with that of T. S. Eliot, several crucial characteristics remain common to the moderns and entitle them to be grouped together in a cultural revolution that was as wide-ranging and significant as the Renaissance. However, before discussing those characteristics, some understanding of early twentieth- century life will be helpful. Historical, Social, and Scientific Background The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed upheavals in long-established political, social, economic, and religious patterns, with the result that the stability of nineteenth-century life was shattered beyond recall. World War I, with its gas and trench warfare, gave lie to the idea of progress that had seemed an inevitable heritage of the European Enlightenment. Instead, the war disillusioned an entire generation brought up on the notion that it was sweet and honorable to die for one's country.(1) While the erosion of a clearly defined class structure in a country like England undermined confidence in a stable social order, the Russian Revolution (1917) brought catastrophic change to Central and Eastern Europe. In America, the stock market crash of 1929 with its resulting world-wide financial Depression challenged the faith in traditional economic authority. Finally, the weakening hold of religion set people adrift in a morally ambiguous and frightening universe. While bringing enormous benefits, technology and urban development also contributed to an increasingly impersonal environment. Cities grew larger -- by 1910 the populations of London and New York each numbered five million -- and their burgeoning size diminished the sense of security and community. As in the Renaissance, scientific advances revealed a universe that was both exciting and terrifying. Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity (1905) and Ernest Rutherford's Theory of the Atom (1911) formulated new ideas that shocked because they contradicted long held beliefs about the movement and stability of matter. Thus, the physical universe seemed to be falling apart as fast as the social and political one. This, then, was the changing world in which the cultural revolution known as modernism erupted. Modernism and the Rebellion Against the Past Self Learning Modernism reflected the tumult of this world in various ways. On one level, the 2 Material movement rebelled against the artistic past. In painting, this rebellion took the An Anglo-American Anthology form of a complete abdication of what, until then, had preoccupied most artists Notes in the post-medieval West -- the imitation of external reality. As if by prior agreement, modern artists of all nations and types deliberately chose not to reproduce reality or copy from nature, perhaps because photography could do so in a much more faithful way. Indeed, artists distorted natural forms and even rejected the principle of single perspective that had prevailed since the days of Michelangelo. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso embodied these new ideas to perfection. Moreover, the work's semi-abstract, fractured human bodies and use of multiple points of perspective within a single canvas seemed, like so much of modern art, purposely designed to shock the sensibilities of the public. In music, composers rejected what, until the end of the nineteenth century, had been the basis of all Western music -- the chromatic scale and the dominant concept of consonance or harmonious sounds. Instead, the new music often abandoned tonality altogether. It substituted a mingling of discordant sounds (dissonance) and even included non-musical sounds such as those of fire engines as well as artificially produced ones such as electronically synthesized music. The work of Edgard Varèse, among others, provides a showcase of these modernist principles. Modernism and the Reevaluation of the Distant Past On the other hand, a renewed interest emerged in the far reaches of the human past, specifically in the areas of myth and ancient cultures. Picasso's Demoiselles reflects this trend too; the woman on the left stands with one foot forward, the typical position in ancient Egyptian art. Other figures have mask-like faces, remarkably similar to the African masks that several of Picasso's friends had acquired by 1906. Efforts to identify any one actual mask as a specific influence for the Demoiselles d'Avignon suggest that no single work that Picasso saw directly caused him to change his technique in mid-stream. Rather, the African artists' conceptual art, which made no effort to reproduce an exact lifelike image but distilled the concept of a face in almost abstract terms, reinforced the modernists in their experimentation with form. Picasso himself likened his affinity for African art, with its sophisticated abstraction of human form, to Renaissance artists' interest in Greco-Roman classicism, with its glorification of natural human form. Picture of Igor Stravinsky, portrait by Picasso. Igor Stravinsky, portrait by Picasso. In music, a fascination with primitive myth contributed to the dissonant tones favored by composers such as Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). In Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), Stravinsky imagines in music the pagan rituals of ancient Russia. The Rite of Spring culminates in the community's choice of a virgin who must dance herself to death to propitiate the god of spring, whose Self Learning Material 3 Modern Literature Notes advent anxiously is awaited in the ice-bound north (compare the Dionysian fertility rites of ancient Greece described in the Classical Drama section). With its pulsating rhythms and unharmonious sounds, the first performance of The Rite of Spring caused a riot in Paris on the night of May 29, 1913. Literature, too, both embraced and abandoned the past, and like art and music, found myth a fertile ground for inspiration, thanks in large part to works like Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890-1914), an immensely influential anthropological study. Writers such as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner, to name just a few, used myth both as subject matter and structure for their works. Many of Yeats's best poems derive from Irish legend ("Who Goes With Fergus") or classical myth ("Leda and the Swan"). Eliot too used myth, most notably in The Waste Land (1922). Having read Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), Eliot was struck by the Arthurian story of a sterile fisher king whose lands are symbolically barren. Seizing upon this ancient myth, Eliot saw how the legend could embody his thoughts and feelings about the present. Moreover, it was Eliot who perceived the general purpose that myth served in modern literature. Writing about James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922), based on the adventures of Homer's legendary hero in the Odyssey, Eliot observed that myth enabled a writer to give "a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Some Characteristic Features of Literary Modernism Characterization and the Hero For all their interest in ancient myth and ritual, however, modern writers broke with the literary past in more ways than they tried to preserve it. The symbolist movement, as we have seen in the Nineteenth-Century Prose Narrative section, foreshadowed modernism's interest in a deeper than surface reality. Part of that new, deeper reality involved a change in the portrayal of literary characters. Suddenly authors became aware that, in the words of novelist Virginia Woolf, "In or about December, 1910, human character changed." Woolf's precise date could refer to two key events that, in her mind at least, signalled the end of one age and the start of another -- the death of England's King Edward VII and the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London. Though Woolf exaggerated -- human character itself had not changed -- people's knowledge of it had. Thanks in large part to the tireless documentation by Sigmund Freud of the power of the unconscious and of human sexuality, writers realized that the human personality, far from being a rational and comprehensible whole, was infinitely more complex than previously imagined. Consequently, the nineteenth century's tendency to define character by means of historical and social contexts was no longer adequate; newer, subtler techniques had to be developed to capture the irrational, unpredictable, darker side of human nature.

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